DoD thinks big data analytics, AI and machine learning can help reduce labor intensive field work. Image: Casimiro PT/Shutterstock.com
By: FEDweek StaffDoD will take over from OPM responsibility for conducting nearly all background checks for issuing or renewing federal employee security clearances by end of the current fiscal year next September 30, officials told a House Armed Services Committee hearing.
Under a previously enacted law, DoD was already working to take over those checks for its own employees but the administration’s government reorganization plan issued in the summer advocated that DoD perform those checks for other agencies, as well. That was one of the aspects of that plan which raised questions regarding whether a change in law would needed; the administration now has in effect signaled that it intends to make the change under its own authority.
The OPM stood up a new sub-agency, the National Background Investigations Bureau, following the breaches revealed in 2015 of OPM’s background check database and a personnel records database. The NBIB handles about 95 percent of clearance investigations government-wide and DoD accounts for about 70 percent of its workload.
An OPM official said at the hearing that there currently is a backlog of some 600,000 cases, down by about 120,000 from the peak in the spring.
A DoD official said that department is working to “streamline traditional labor-intensive processes that exist today, to continue to identify ways to economize field investigative work, and automate the process wherever possible.”
“Long delays for background investigations can be eliminated by enhancing and largely replacing time intensive field work with the power of big data analytics, artificial intelligence, machine learning and publicly available social media data sources. We will use field investigations to fill gaps, not as the means to collect information that is more readily available through automated processes,” he said.
